School shopping on Web leaves little to the imagination

Today, the joyful ritual of beginning a new school year officially died for me. It became, instead, another memorial cross beside the Internet highway.

Fall is my favorite season; has been from the time I was six. Getting ready for school then and getting five girls ready for school now equaled, before a few hours ago, a pleasure without name.

It's complicated, of course, with this many children. We strive to cut costs and still meet the criteria of "cool." Living in a rural area can lend itself to problems finding the right sizes and styles for five diverse personalities while staying under budget, and so we also shop the Internet.

Until today. This became the day I finally knew what everyone--the media, educators and child psychologists--has been saying about the Internet, but I've had a hard time taking very seriously. Not that I didn't believe them, exactly, it's just that I thought what most people think. If you're vigilant, if you talk to your kids, if you try to stay informed, there's no need to freak out about what your child could encounter online.

How bad could shopping for school clothes be, anyway? It wasn't like we were trolling for porn.

Except we were. Unwittingly, we became another hit on the Abercrombie & Fitch Web site when we typed in their address to look for a basic long-sleeved black T-shirt.

What I saw on the home page took my breath away, and I threw my hands in front of the screen to shield my daughters' eyes.

"Get back," I screamed, shocked out of my parental mode of modulated voice and reasonable explanations.

There in front of me, in front of us, was a bevy of young people, probably high-school age or younger, posing for the camera. With a few clicks, I saw boys and girls in all sorts of positions. Wearing school clothes? Abercrombie & Fitch is a clothing retailer, after all, marketing particularly to the 12- to 14-year-old age group.

You couldn't tell it from these pictures. From the relatively mild shot of a shirtless young man, to the eye-popping scene of an apparently naked girl standing between two--as far as I could tell--nude boys, it was difficult to find what apparel was being promoted. It looked like A&F was pushing the idea that sex needn't be limited to adults or tradition.

The link to women's clothing led to a photograph of a young girl looking over her shoulder and laughing into the camera. She's topless, her long hair scarcely covering her breasts, the top of her buttocks are showing in the mirror behind her. The model looks about 15.

Under the A&F Quarterly banner, the site shows two naked boys in a convertible; a female passenger leans forward between them, her only accessory a pair of red panties.

I could go on and tell you about the A&F controversies that a Google search exposed, how A&F sells thongs for 7 to 10 year olds, with "wink wink" and "eye candy" printed on the front. I'm guessing by now though, that most parents are already sickened and outraged.

But A&F won't mind. The company depends on its outlandish campaigns to stir things up. The old maxim that any publicity equals good publicity rings true here. Despite some plateaus on the New York Stock Exchange, Abercrombie & Fitch's shares have a steady up trend. Which translates to customers supporting the sexualization of children, even when they think they're just buying jeans. All of us have unknowingly paid for practices we find abhorrent, from foreign child labor to racial discrimination, when we make uninformed purchases. To be fair, we can't possibly keep track of every company whose products we use.

But I do know that Abercrombie & Fitch is selling sex. More specifically, it's selling what amounts to child pornography on its Web site; there is no other name for the images found there. It is shocking, it is dehumanizing, it is wrong.